We all think we know why Stadia died. Here’s Google’s official take.
Google’s streaming dream died in January this year: the Google Stadia streaming service joined a laundry list of projects the company has canned over the years. Google could open a Ben & Jerry’s-style flavor graveyard for them all. We know the streaming platform struggled with market share since its release in 2019, and I never was a fan of its business model, but today we do have some insight into why Google closed Stadia down, from the person in charge of doing so.
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google’s position leading up to Stadia’s closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise.
“For Stadia to succeed, both consumers and publishers needed to find sufficient value in the Stadia platform. Stadia conducted user experience research on the reasons why gamers choose one platform over another. That research showed that the primary reasons why gamers choose a game platform are (1) content catalog (breadth and depth) and (2) network effects (where their friends play).
“Publishers, for their part, have to devise where to spend their limited development and marketing energy, and which platforms to favor to reach the broadest audience.”
This is where things get sticky for Stadia, and it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. If users go where the games are, and the publishers put the games where the players are, if you lose either the players or the games, you might lose it all.
“However, Stadia never had access to the extensive library of games available on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam.
